Newsday Tuesday:

Tess Gallagher has finally gotten an anthology of poems called Midnight Lantern (great title) which can be purchased here, and find reviews here.

One of my favorite Tess Gallager Poems:

BLACK MONEY

His lungs heaving all day in a sulphur mist,
then dusk, the lunch pail torn from him
before he reaches the house, his children
a cloud of swallows about him.
At the stove in the tumbled rooms, the wife,
her back the wall he fights most, and she
with no weapon but silence
and to keep him from the bed.

In their sleep the mill hums and turns
at the edge of water. Blue smoke
swells the night and they drift
from the graves they have made for each other,
float out from the open-mouthed sleep
of their children, past banks and businesses,
the used car lots, liquor store, the swings in the park.

The mill burns on, now a burst of cinders,
now whistles screaming down the bay, saws jagged
in half light. Then like a whip
the sun across the bed, windows high with mountains
and the sleepers fallen to pillows
as gulls fall, tilting
against their shadows on the log booms.
Again the trucks shudder the wood framed houses
passing the mill. My father
snorts, splashes in the bathroom,
throws open our doors to cowboy music
on the radio, hearts are cheating,
somebody is alone, there’s blood in Tulsa.
Out the back yard the night-shift men rattle
the gravel in the alley going home.
My father fits goggles to his head.

From his pocket he takes anything metal,
the pearl-handled jack knife, a ring of keys,
and for us, black money shoveled
from the sulphur pyramids heaped in the distance
like yellow gold. Coffee bottle tucked in his armpit
he swaggers past the chicken coop,
a pack of cards at his breast.
In a fan of light beyond him
the Kino Maru pulls out for Seattle,
some black star climbing
the deep globe of his eye.

3. I’ve become more and more enthralled in this idea of the Occupy Wall Street (and other Occupied areas) have libraries. I want a book desperately with an Occupy stamp in it, so much so that my friend Christine and I have started planning a bus trip to NYC. So, in an effort to share in my fascination, here are some awesome links about the library (including the libraries website).

4. There’s a new scent at I Hate Perfume called “In the Library” which smells like old, and dusty books. Will I be purchasing this? Yes. Will my room, cat and I smell like we’ve been stuck in a basement for hundreds of years? Yes. Here is the link.

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5. I’m currently reading The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion and so I thought it would be nice to include an article about her and her newest book on her late daughter, Blue Nights. Didion reminds me of my grandmother, Dolly, in this photo. Here is the link to the LATimes Article.

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6. Goodreads.com is in the semi-finals of their 2011 Book Awards, visit goodreads.com to vote for your favorite books in most categories. (I suggest you vote D.Laux for poetry, but I’m completely bias).

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7. I have an e-reader, however, I can count on my hands how many times I’ve read a book on that screen. Maybe it’s the lack of scent, the blurriness of the letters, the fact it feels like a machine, and not something almost human with a spine… I’m not sure. But here’s an article out of Chicago on why e-readers fail to make bookish nerds like me swoon.

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And that’s it for this weeks Book News. Just a little taste if you don’t feel like googling. Hope everyone is having a good week (just imagine me winking like a newscaster and shuffling the blank papers on my desk).

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“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.” —Franz Kafka